The changes to the specification detailed below are required to identify who are receiving a postgraduate loan for Master's study (via the Student Loans Company), and changes to the monitoring of health specialisms.

New valid entry

Valid entry T – Postgraduate Loan for Masters courses will be added to the Instance.INITIATIVES field to identify students who are receiving a postgraduate loan for master's study.

Changes to REGBODY

There is a requirement to identify health specialisms at a more detailed level than at present. This necessitates the following changes to the valid entries for REGBODY in the Student record:

06 – Not returnable for providers in England or Wales except where students do not specialise until later in their programmes.

HEFCE require this change due to policy changes in England, and HEFCW, SFC and DfE(NI) have asked for these changes to also apply to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland in order to retain UK-wide consistency. This policy change occurred outside the normal cycle of changes to the record specification, and late notification could not be avoided. If this data was not collected through the Student record, separate data collection would be required. Please let us know if you will experience any specific difficulties returning this data by completing this consultation survey.

C17051: Change to COURSEAIM

COURSEAIM D01 was introduced so that New Route PhDs could be differentiated from other research-based higher degrees. This category of doctoral degree no longer needs to be differentiated in the national data. From C17051 this COURSEAIM will be removed.